Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Affective Priming from Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Facial Expressions and the Influence of Trait Anxiety

Abstract

Abstract& Affective judgments can often be influenced by emotional information people unconsciously perceive, but the neural mechanisms responsible for these effects and how they are modulated by individual differences in sensitivity to threat are unclear. Here we studied subliminal affective priming by recording brain potentials to surprise faces preceded by 30-msec happy or fearful prime faces. Participants showed valenceconsistent changes in affective ratings of surprise faces, although they reported no knowledge of prime-face expressions, nor could they discriminate between prime-face expressions in a forced-choice test. In conjunction with the priming effect on affective evaluation, larger occipital P1 potentials at 145-175 msec were found with fearful than with happy primes, and source analyses implicated the bilateral extrastriate cortex in this effect.

Tinnitus, anxiety and automatic processing of affective information: an explorative study

“…In this subgroup stronger tinnitus-severity complaints are accompanied by stronger affective priming of threat-related information and weaker affective priming for positive affective information and these relations became stronger after controlling for hearing loss at normal and high frequency levels. This result is in line with the study of Li et al [15], who found especially stronger affective priming driven by threatening stimuli for subjects with high trait anxiety as compared to those with low trait anxiety. Furthermore, we found normal priming effects and not reversed ones, which is in line with former research findings [14] where affective priming was found in people with high trait anxiety, and reversed priming effects in people with low trait anxiety.…”

“…Anxious people are typically described as constantly scanning the environment for possible threats [16,17,20]. In terms of the affective priming task, such a threat-related bias may imply that anxious subjects are faster in deciding that a threatening stimulus is unpleasant [15], which is in line with network theory of mood and memory [12,21].…”

“…Studies have demonstrated that high levels of anxiety produce the expected affective priming effects, whereas low levels of anxiety result in reversed priming effects [14]. Furthermore, people with high trait anxiety proved to have stronger affective priming effects than people with low trait anxiety, which was specifically provoked by threat-related primes [15]. Studies concerning attentional processes also demonstrated the presence of a threat-related bias in anxious patients [16].…”

A task-difficulty artifact in subliminal priming

“…These findings of subliminal priming not only were surprising in their own right, but also influenced theories of human information processing (see, e.g., Greenwald, Abrams, , emotional processing (see, e.g., Li, Zinbarg, Boehm, & Paller, 2008), and mental pathology (see, e.g., Dehaene et al, 2003). Although the claim of subliminal priming is influential, the demonstrations of its existence have been critiqued on statistical grounds (Dosher, 1998;Reingold & Merikle, 1988;Rouder, Morey, Speckman, & Pratte, 2007).…”

An electrophysiological investigation into the automaticity of emotional face processing in high versus low trait anxious individuals

“…A second possible expla-P1 effects, however, were not modified by trait anxiety. There are relatively few studies examining links between anxiety and ERP responses to expressive faces, but, of those conducted, effects of anxiety on early sensory components such as the P1 have been reported by some groups (e.g., Holmes et al, 2008;Li, Zinbarg, Boehm, & Paller, 2008) but not others (e.g., Bar-Haim, Lamy, & Glickman, 2005). Further work is needed to examine the influence of anxiety on posterior components triggered by emotional expressions.…”